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Catching (Real) Viruses With Silicon
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers in Iowa have used nanotechnology to develop a very small silicon chip to catch and help identify viruses, according to Technology Research News. The device, dubbed the ViriChip, is used in conjunction with an atomic force microscope (AFM). The prototype is already able to identify several viruses and should be in labs in less than two years. A particular application could help save lives by enabling doctors to check a donor heart for potential infections before transplanting it to a patient. This overview contains more details. It also includes references to other articles about the ViriChip and images showing how it looks and a virus it detected."
you need an atomic force microscope to analyze the results. Them AFMs ain't cheap or common.
As a casual fan of science, this looks way cool for detecting viruses* that we already know about, by using the antibodies that attach to the virus protein as the detection agent. But aren't we limited to viruses for whom we've already isolated antibodies?
I wonder how hard it will be to expand this into a more general virus detection/identification tool? It seems like you could break up your suite of antibody-derived proteins into smaller, more generic chunks that would be more likely to bind to the virus. But I'm getting beyond my depth -- would like to hear from someone who knows what they're talking about!
* I've heard virii is now passe' -- any confirmation?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
In the '70s, a Nobel laureate in physics, Ivar Giaever, an expert in thin films, took a sabbatical in San Diego to investigate immunology out of deep curiosity. Among the things he came up with was a carefully designed film of indium which could be deposited onto a glass microscope slide. You could then dip half the slide into a solution containing the antibody, rotate the slide 90 degrees and dip into a solution containing the antigen. If there were enough antigen present in the second solution, the quadrant of the slide on which antigen-antibody complexes were stuck was visibly different from the other quadrants in ordinary light, even though the antibody and antigen layers were one molecule thick. I don't know whether anything came of this later. He was thinking about a cheap and easily administered clinical test at the time.